Optimal computer configuration

[PeterS]

Hi all,

I am new in the PTGui Support group, and just recently started using PTGui. My question is, I have 3.000,- Euro to spend on a new machine to use PTGui on, what is the optimal configuration?

I am using PTGui for registration of images to finally make a time lapse movie, using 1500 photos for example.

 

I did read the discussions of Jim and Nadonou on memory usage, but I am still puzzled.

 

Question 1:  processors

2 quad core processors (Intel® Xeon® Processor E5620 (Quad Core, 2.40 GHz, 12MB Cache, 5.86 GT/sIntel® QPI)

or one six core processor(Intel® Xeon® Processor X5650 (Six Core, 2.66 GHz, 12MB Cache, 6.40 GT/sIntel® QPI))  ?

 

Question 2: memmory

I am thinking of 48GB (6x8GB) 1333MHz DDR3 ECC RDIMM, or is this to much/low?

 

Question 3: hard drives

What is best, RAID 0 or 1? Is it better to have mutliple hard drives?

 

Or maybe I should takeinto account other factor I am not mentioning, to prevent a bottleneck and reduce processing time?

 

 

thank you very much in advance,

Peter

 

 

[Joergen Geerds]

On Friday, August 17, 2012 10:40:22 AM UTC-4, PeterS wrote:

I am new in the PTGui Support group, and just recently started using PTGui. My question is, I have 3.000,- Euro to spend on a new machine to use PTGui on, what is the optimal configuration?

That is either an iMac, or a PC, MacPro is out of the question, maybe a MBP if you need to stay mobile. Mac or PC is your personal decision.

 

I am using PTGui for registration of images to finally make a time lapse movie, using 1500 photos for example.

is this a one time project, or something ongoing/commercial? if it's a one time project, you could use any regular setup, and just let it process... it might take a bit longer, but it'll still finish. if this is a commercial project, akin to henry stewart's Olympics project, where deadlines where around every corner, your €3000 setup won't cut the cheese. reality is probably somewhere in-between.

 

I did read the discussions of Jim and Nadonou on memory usage, but I am still puzzled.

re-read them again.

 

Question 1:  processors

2 quad core processors (Intel® Xeon® Processor E5620 (Quad Core, 2.40 GHz, 12MB Cache, 5.86 GT/sIntel® QPI)

or one six core processor(Intel® Xeon® Processor X5650 (Six Core, 2.66 GHz, 12MB Cache, 6.40 GT/sIntel® QPI))  ?

As said before, buy as many and as fast CPU's you can afford, more is better.

 

Question 2: memmory

I am thinking of 48GB (6x8GB) 1333MHz DDR3 ECC RDIMM, or is this to much/low?

there is no such thing as "too much RAM" – same as above, buy as much as you can stuff in and can afford. two options: look at your (uncompressed) source images folder size, and use this as a guideline how much RAM you need... or open ptgui and use the "calculate temp space" tool to get an idea.

 

Question 3: hard drives

What is best, RAID 0 or 1? Is it better to have mutliple hard drives?

RAID0 is faster, and drive failures are rare, and you can deal with that by making manual copies to another (slower) drive. SSDs are much faster than spinning disks, but cost more. see http://www.facebook.com/groups/panoramicphotographers/doc/255048297872622/ (this probably still applies to you, since you are trying to build a mid-range computer on a budget)... ptgui itself seems to be happy with one really fast SSD for scratch.

[PeterS]

That really helps, thanks!

 

The project is actually not a one time project, it hopefully will become commercial.

We intend to buy a PC, actually a Dell precision T7500 or T7600, but you may have suggestions on that one.

 

thanks again Joergen,

Peter

[PeterS]

Hi Joergen,

I'm asking your advice onse more. As I mentioned before, I am using ptgui for image registration for time-lapse movies of up to ten thousend images of 6-12 megapixel each. I am in the process of bying a new machine, and my budget is 4500,-Euro. I was thinking of the following configuration:

 

window 7 64bit

-2 x Xeon processors 2.9GH six core 15MB

-8x8 = 64 GB ddr3 ram

-ssd 256 GB

-2 x 2TB HD

-1GB NVIDIA 2000 quadro

 

What do you think of this configuration? Would you change some things? More/less ram or larger SSD? Two SSD and only 1 2TB HD?

 

Please comment on this configuration,

thank you very much in advance,

Peter

 

 

 

 

 

Op vrijdag 17 augustus 2012 17:51:59 UTC+2 schreef Joergen Geerds het volgende:

[Joergen Geerds]

On Sunday, March 24, 2013 5:12:40 PM UTC-4, PeterS wrote:

Hi Joergen,

I'm asking your advice onse more. As I mentioned before, I am using ptgui for image registration for time-lapse movies of up to ten thousend images of 6-12 megapixel each. I am in the process of bying a new machine, and my budget is 4500,-Euro. I was thinking of the following configuration:

 

window 7 64bit

-2 x Xeon processors 2.9GH six core 15MB

-8x8 = 64 GB ddr3 ram

-ssd 256 GB

-2 x 2TB HD

-1GB NVIDIA 2000 quadro

I'd go for 2x480GB SSD (i.e. Sandisk, configured in RAID0 for system and scratch) and either 2x2TB (RAID0) + 1x3TB (local backup) or, if you have time, 1x2TB or 1x3TB + 1x3TB  (local backup) (do not ignore the great importance to have instant immediate backup of all your current data)

If you have to shave off some money, go for 48GB RAM, even 32GB may be sufficient in the beginning, and you can upgrade later. (check if the MB needs sets of 2 or sets of 3 for best performance)

[Henrik]

Hi Peter,

Having build computers for the past 20 years, and having a particular interest in high performance computers for Panoramic editing and Photoshop work.

I would like to make some suggestions and add to what Joergen has just added to your setup. but just to be clear, when we talk number of drives/ssd's in a given RAID configuration then its the minimum that is written here, you can feel free to add more drives if you have the budget and can see the need for it.

I would first off look for an external RAID controller with 8 or more channels (LSI or Areca), i have both in the same system, why an external controller, well because you can move it to another system, should your system get sick :-) and you continue to use and access your data.

Not knowing what mainboard you have chosen, I would suggest looking at 16GB sticks instead of 8GB sticks SAMSUNG has some sticks floating around on various website that are great and cheap with ECC, why because you are talking tens of thousand of images, and you have two very fast processor, what you don't want is a situation that you do not have enough memory to feed the CPU's approx 4gb per core (at least this is the case wth my X5650's) the newer that you are looking at could even require more

Second, you need to be able to feed the RAM with enough data or rather fast enough that RAM isn't waiting, so thats why we build ARRAYs of disks (Disks =SSD or HDD of your choice) with RAID-0 (ZERO) being the fastest, at the expense of Redundancy. Its your call if you want to run at a different RAID level, but I run my machines with only RAID-0, and my backup's with RAID-6.

I am not sure what program you are using for your time-lapse movies, but photoshop and Premiere, and most of the Panoramic programs uses a scratch/temp disk, and if this is the case with your time-lapse too, then I would also create a separate disk for that. So you storage setup will look something like this

C:\ System and Applications

D:\ Scratch and temp disk

E:\ Data disk

F:\ Internal backup of E:\ Data Disk (Copy 1)

Z:\ External Backup of E:\ Data Disk (Copy 2)

You might say, ooooh, thats a lot of disks, and it is! I currently have 20 SSD's in my system, and counting to add more! the result is that I have been able to improve my time less spend on the computer :-) and more time taking pictures or talking to clients or simply having a family life :-)

Internally on my machine I only use SSD's and when you add them together in a RAID-0 the small sizes adds up to a bigger size, if you can afford to buy many large SSD's great! but its the number of disks that makes up the speed!

 

On the graphics side? Why a Quadro card? do you use 3D applications?? Do you have any special needs for a Quadro card? just get a 680 or 690 nVidia card or two or four if you can fit them in - no need to buy expensive Quadro cards if you don't have a special need for it! believe me I have made that mistake once with two Quadro FX-3400 yes thats a few years ago, but thinking about the cost of them back then and what something 1/8 of the price could do in terms of performance i felt a bit ..... no happy and very poor.

Ohh, now that you have gotten all this your little ATX box isn't going to fit all this and the 800W powersupply you bought isn;t going to make it either - so its out getting a good roomy case, and 1200+W powersupply Antec, EVGA or similar - you also need to consider cooling fan's and unless you want to feel like sitting next to the latest A380 then I suggest that you either look at close loop water cooling or Noctua fan's that are relatively quiet. The biggest problem is the Graphics card(s) their fan's gets very noisy, so look for GPU's for low noise.

As for SSD's I recommend INTEL, SAMSUNG they may not be the fastest but the INTEL are very reliable - reliable is your best friend!!!

good luck - and if you don't believe what I have to say, then look here http://hdview.at/speedtest/results.html :-) but that sort of speed you will not get for $4500

 
Henrik Tived

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[PTGui] Re: Optimal computer configuration

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[PeterS]

Hi Henrik and Joergen,

to be honest I am not an expert at all in building computers! Based on both your comments I reconsidered the optimal configuration for me. Could you please comment on the following:

 

window 7 64bit

-2 x Xeon processors 2.0 GHz six core 15MB 7.2 GT/s (2.9GHz was too expensive)

-4x8 = 64 GB ddr3 ram  (based on joergen's comment)

 

-ssd 250 GB for system  raid 0

-ssd 250 GB for scratch  raid 0

-2 x 2TB HD   

-1GB NVIDIA or little less

 

 

then some more questions:

-why do the 2TB SATA HD's have to be raid 0? aren't they just for storage and internal backup?

-I probably do need a specific HDD controller and HDD configuration, but I haven't got a clue. Why is this important and what type do you recommend?

-Do you remmend both samsung and intel SSD's? Like the samsung 840 250GB and Intel 520 240GB?

 

thank you very much again,

Peter 

 

 

 

Op maandag 25 maart 2013 03:03:41 UTC+1 schreef tived het volgende:

[PeterS]

Sorry, I meant

4x8 = 32 GB ddr3 ram  (based on joergen's comment)

 

regards,

Peter

 

Op maandag 25 maart 2013 21:46:56 UTC+1 schreef PeterS het volgende:

[Joergen Geerds]

Tived made excellent, and very knowldegable comments, far more windows oriented than what I could provide as a hardcore mac user ith general computer understanding. I do assume your MB has plenty of SATA3 connectors, and that windows or the bios offers some form of RAID0 functionality (OS X does)... although soft-raid may not be as efficient as a dedicated hardware raid controller, it is still delivering a considerable advance in speed, for pretty much $0 in cost.

the reason why to make a RAID0 from the 2x2TB is speed: a single spinning disk provides about 120MB/s, and 2 of them will give you 200-250MB/sec, which is nice when you load large tiffs into ptgui. (a 2xSSD RAID0 should give you 600-1000MB/sec)

[Henrik]

Hi Joergen,

Thanks, I think that most of this can be applied to both Mac and PC, at least from the modifications that I have made to several MacPro's it has proven particular useful as the default configurations are so limited on the Mac. This approach here is data driven, follow the data and add the hardward to support the flow.

I was originally approached by Adobe in 2005/2006 to do the PC side of what macperformance.com do but due to work constraints at the time, I could allocate the time for it. A bit of a shame as it would have been fun and very helpful to a lot of people. Lloyd is doing a great job on the Mac side of things and many of the ideas can be ported to windows PC's

Have a fab day

Henrik Tived

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Cc:

"Henrik" <ti...@iinet.net.au>

Sent:

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:51:04 -0700 (PDT)

Subject:

Re: [PTGui] Re: Optimal computer configuration

Tived made excellent, and very knowldegable comments, far more windows oriented than what I could provide as a hardcore mac user ith general computer understanding. I do assume your MB has plenty of SATA3 connectors, and that windows or the bios offers some form of RAID0 functionality (OS X does)... although soft-raid may not be as efficient as a dedicated hardware raid controller, it is still delivering a considerable advance in speed, for pretty much $0 in cost.

the reason why to make a RAID0 from the 2x2TB is speed: a single spinning disk provides about 120MB/s, and 2 of them will give you 200-250MB/sec, which is nice when you load large tiffs into ptgui. (a 2xSSD RAID0 should give you 600-1000MB/sec)

--

[PeterS]

Thanks again!

Now I got some questions from the company I am ordering the machine. They were questioning the 2SSD's in raid 0, since if one fails, all data is lost. I think they are right, but is that a reason not to make that configuration?

I assume you guys always keep backups of your SSD's and let the SSD's in raid 0 do the work?

 

A more general question, when you start a very large project with PTgui, do you first have to put all the thousends of images to the raid 0 SSD's to exploit their speed? Or do you only need to write to those ssd's?

 

thanks in advance,

Peter 

 

Op dinsdag 26 maart 2013 00:51:04 UTC+1 schreef Joergen Geerds het volgende:

[Joergen Geerds]

On Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:57:49 AM UTC-4, PeterS wrote:

Thanks again!

Now I got some questions from the company I am ordering the machine. They were questioning the 2SSD's in raid 0, since if one fails, all data is lost. I think they are right, but is that a reason not to make that configuration?

I assume you guys always keep backups of your SSD's and let the SSD's in raid 0 do the work?

 

A: RAID0 drives fail occasionally. I never had a drive failure in any of my RAID0 setups (up to 6 drives in a cluster), but that doesn't mean it never happens 

B: if a drive fails, you have your internal backup drive (the 3TB drive I mentioned earlier), which should be bootable in case of disaster. if your PC builder fails to see/understand the advantage of a permanent backup drive, it's time to find a better builder.

A more general question, when you start a very large project with PTgui, do you first have to put all the thousends of images to the raid 0 SSD's to exploit their speed? Or do you only need to write to those ssd's?

yes, I usually have all stuff that needs fast access on a SSD RAID0 as well.

[PeterS]

Great, I really appreciate the swift and detailed answers!!

 

thanks al lot again,

Peter

 

Op woensdag 27 maart 2013 20:02:54 UTC+1 schreef Joergen Geerds het volgende:

[PeterS]

 

Hi Joergen and Tived,

just to make sure that I checked all possibilities:

Is it possible to have a 2TB HD for system and applications, and still fully expoit the speed of 2 SSD'd raid 0 when doing large projects with thousend of images? 

 

In other words, is it necessary to have PTgui installed on the 2SSD's raid 0 and use those for system and scratch to fully exploit the speed of the SSD's?

 

 

thanx again,

Peter

 

 

 

Op woensdag 27 maart 2013 20:49:19 UTC+1 schreef PeterS het volgende:

[PTGui Support]

Hi Peter,

PTGui does not have to be installed on a fast disk; the operating system
will load PTGui.exe into RAM memory.

PTGui's temp files should definitely be on the SSD. You'll get a little
more speed improvement if the source and output files are also on the SSD.

Kind regards,

New House Internet Services BV
Joost Nieuwenhuijse

-----------------------------------------------
PTGui - Photo Stitching Software

www.ptgui.com
For support see: http://www.ptgui.com/faq/
-----------------------------------------------

[PeterS]

Hi Joost,

ok, that is clear. But does that mean that the operating system needs to be on the SSD partition? I prefer not, to not be in trouble when one ssd disk crashes. It would be optimal if we could have the operating system on a regular HD, and use the SSD's raid 0 for temp and scratch and still fully exploit the ssd speed andstill have a very stable system and not be in trouble when one ssd crashes.

 

thanks a lot,

Peter

 

 

 

 

Op vrijdag 29 maart 2013 18:25:28 UTC+1 schreef PTGui Support het volgende:

[Joergen Geerds]

On Wednesday, April 3, 2013 11:39:52 AM UTC-4, PeterS wrote:

Hi Joost,

ok, that is clear. But does that mean that the operating system needs to be on the SSD partition? I prefer not, to not be in trouble when one ssd disk crashes. It would be optimal if we could have the operating system on a regular HD, and use the SSD's raid 0 for temp and scratch and still fully exploit the ssd speed andstill have a very stable system and not be in trouble when one ssd crashes.

the reason to have the system on a SSD as well is for memory paging, and OS X and windows are fundamentally different in this regard, afaik: OS X will do memory paging/swapping as soon as applications exceed their allocated RAM, in other words, you can keep an eye on your RAM usage, and avoid memory swapping all together (using XRG for example). Maybe Tived can help out with details here, but I think windows has a permanent swap file (same or larger than your physical RAM) which is by default on your root drive (but can be moved to another drive?), and this swap file is permanently used (no idea why). I think it is beneficial to either have your win system on a SSD as well, or at least move your memory paging file to a faster drive. Tived: it is clear that I am a OS X user, so feel free to correct me when I am wrong.

[Geoff - Spherical Visions]

In Windows you define where you want your swap file(s) they don't even have to be all in one place, so you can cascade the speeds downwards if you really need to !

[PTGui Support]

Actually all operating systems are very similar in this respect:
applications can request as much memory as they need. Once the total
amount of requested memory exceeds the amount of available RAM, the OS
will start swapping the least recently used RAM pages to disk. To
applications this happens transparently: when an application attempts to
read from an area of memory that is paged to disk, the OS will swap out
another page and swap in the requested memory page. But the application
is put on hold while this happens so the performance will quickly
suffer. Therefore it is recommended to have the page file on a fast
disk, or avoid paging altogether by ensuring that there is anough RAM.

On Mac the page file is always on the system disk (or you really would
need to mess with OS X internals, not recommended). On windows the page
file can be put on any disk, even more than one. So you can install
Windows itself on a slow disk and the page file on a fast SSD.

PTGui will never request more memory than configured in Options -
Advanced. If it needs more space it will create and manage its own
temporary files, separate from the OS page file.

Kind regards,

New House Internet Services BV
Joost Nieuwenhuijse

-----------------------------------------------
PTGui - Photo Stitching Software

www.ptgui.com
For support see: http://www.ptgui.com/faq/
-----------------------------------------------

[PeterS]

Dear Joost, Joergen, Tived and Geoff,

 

Thank you all for the very knowledgeable comments. I think I have all the information I need, but still need someone to convince me what to do (-;

 

1) Make the 2ssd'd raid 0 partition the system and stratch partition, being fast but with the risk of losing the system disk when one ssd crashes, or,

 

2) Use a separate HD for system, ans use the 2ssd's raid 0 only for scratch (and paging). With the risk of losing speed and configuration problems, but with a reliable system when one of the ssd's crashes.

 

 

please help me with this choice, then I hope my nect post will be about PTgui again, and not about hardware (-;

 

thank a lot!

Peter

 

Op donderdag 4 april 2013 10:08:40 UTC+2 schreef PTGui Support het volgende:

[Geoff - Spherical Visions]

Always a trade off;

1) Make the 2ssd'd raid 0 partition the system and stratch partition, being fast but with the risk of losing the system disk when one ssd crashes, or,

An option might be make the system dual boot with a copy of the OS on both a SSD and HD then if either fails you can still boot from the other ...
 

 

2) Use a separate HD for system, ans use the 2ssd's raid 0 only for scratch (and paging). With the risk of losing speed and configuration problems, but with a reliable system when one of the ssd's crashes.

This would be my choice, the slight time increase in starting a program or loading a DLL is going to be minor compared to the many operations on the temp data files on the SSD.

[Henrik]

Hi Peter,

If you want to have extra redundancy then you could also consider a RAID-10 or 5 but you are looking at minimum 4 drives. I run my C; drive on 8x Samsung 830 128GB disks on an Areca 1882ix 24channel controller with 4gb of ram. I have had no problems - RAID-0 e.g. NO REDUNDANCY!. I so also have a second computer as a backup, but with a lot lower specs. should it happen that a drive drop out.

You have to do what you feel comfortable with - I can't make that decision for you. I want the extra speed and I am aware of the consequences - all I have to do is reinstall my software OS and apps - all my data is on two other Arrays and yes one of them is a RAID-0 array ;-) the other a RAID-6 (with two drive redundancy) Its an expensive setup - but thats the cost of wanting the need for speed IMHO.

Storage setup

1) OS and Apps

2)Scratch disk/temp

3)Data disk

4)Backup

5) External Backup

1-3 is my daily workspace, 4 gets updated regularly and 5... well i don't have that at the moment - its just a bunch of disks lying around ;-)

The above will give you the max throughput for PTGui and any Photoshop work provided you have configured both programs to access all the different disks ;-)

have a great weekend

Henrik Tived

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[PeterS]

Thanks a lot again,

I will make my decision soon (-;

 

regards,

Peter

 

Op zaterdag 6 april 2013 06:35:47 UTC+2 schreef tived het volgende: